


Bystander

by illegible



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:44:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1528433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illegible/pseuds/illegible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's always too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bystander

She finds out after the police but before the reporters.

His hospital room is a crime scene and he’s gone. The doctor is dead, his blood sliding down the wall, pooled on the floor where his skull landed. Seeing it is important. She can’t allow herself not to.

Gilda doesn’t believe their suspicions at first, comes up with a thousand impossible explanations for what happened. The doctor with his family grieving outside, with his red-eyed wife and their son who can’t hide it (eleven years old, god he hasn’t even hit puberty, hasn’t fallen in love for the first time, hasn’t graduated high school or figured out what he’s going to do with his life and his father won’t be there)…the doctor must have done something.

She can’t stay in that room.

A pair of nurses are standing in the hallway talking quietly between themselves. Older women, still in their scrubs, one dark and heavy and the other thin and gray. They look up as she steps out, and Gilda can only meet their gaze for a moment trying to speak while her throat clogs and her tongue grows thick and her eyes start to sting and she can’t even see the one who takes her by the arm. Gilda fails to get the request through her lips but thank god, thank god this _wonderful_ nurse understands what she needs anyway. There’s a staff bathroom, and she tells her softly to take all the time she needs, and the sheer kindness of it is what shatters her completely. The sob that wracks through her is loud, inelegant, gasping, and Gilda struggles to take it back as she hurries out of sight. She can’t handle being on display right now.

Harvey left the hospital alone in stolen clothes, his face bare, and she keeps seeing the court video play over and over in muted tones, a repetition she forced upon herself because she should have _been there_ (there was nothing she could have done even if she had, she would have been useless, everyone in Gotham would have been useless) and even in the distant audio he…

…he _screamed_ when it happened.

It was violent and shrill and unrestrained and she could hear it edging off his teeth straining through the roof of his mouth, all the breath in his body expended into sound and that sound only kept going as he staggered back, fell to the floor clawing at chemicals eating through skin muscle bone spreading to his hand in the process burning him alive. She couldn’t even see details through the footage but oh god she could _hear it_.

He didn’t stop all at once either, even with the crowd rushing around him to do nothing but gawk and hover (she would have been useless too but it doesn’t matter) it—he had to breathe, but every breath only took him back and gradually the interruptions outweighed his voice until there was nothing left.

A doctor is dead. Harvey killed his doctor and now nobody can find him.

By the time Gilda Dent saw her husband destroyed, it was already too late.


End file.
